“My mission is to help you reframe issues – separating people from the problem – so that all involved can meet their needs with the future in mind.”
–- Natalija VOJNO
Our Shared Futures was founded to facilitate transformative dialogues where core values can be expressed and alternative outcomes imagined. We do this by connecting people to nature and each other through a variety of initiatives and custom programming in support of long-term stewardship and longevity of movements, collectives, and organizations.
We are here to support with institutional design and relational process building, helping different parties navigate complex issues such as land use planning, water governance, and environmental financing.
Team
Natalija Vojno, Founder & Principal
Fostering foresight, empathy, and imagination to develop pathways for mutual gain.
Natalija Vojno mediates, designs, and facilitates processes that help people identify their common values and pathways towards more liveable futures. Her multi-partial approach guides clients to develop solutions for mutual gain — and at times, structures for cooperative governance. She brings to the table the ability to convene business, government, and civil society leaders as well as disgruntled neighbours, roommates, and siblings with a focus on practical solutions that enable diverse actors to work together on complex environmental challenges.
Natalija is a peace innovator who comes to the field of mediation with a decade of experience helping diverse groups align on environmental priorities and actions – be it North America’s Great Lakes or the Nile River. Her past as a watershed campaigner, speechwriter for Ontario’s Minister of the Environment, and global youth network leader inform her practice. Years of collaborating with distributed teams of stakeholders, across multiple time zones and sectors, have honed her ability to help people move forward across their differences. She works across scales to open up the heart of a conflict.
Her post-war homeland of Bosnia & Herzegovina inspired her lifelong desire for social cohesion. As a result, she co-founded a peacebuilding project in the Balkans called Naša Gora. Approaching conflict transformation from a creative lens, she has piloted values-based community-building projects and is an UNLEASH Innovation Lab fellow.
She was trained in community mediation by St. Stephen’s House, cross-cultural dialogue by Soliya, as well as advanced mediation by Ken Cloke and Aaron Wolf. Her negotiation training is from the Clingendael Institute in the Hague and MIT’s Lawrence Susskind.
Natalija holds a BA from the University of Toronto, an MSc in Water Resources Management from UNESCO-IHE, in the Netherlands and an MA in Public Policy from ICU, in Japan. As a Rotary Peace Fellow, her research focused on natural resources policy and participatory water governance processes.
Natalija grew up in Toronto by the banks of the Humber River on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Chippewa, the Seneca and the Wendat peoples.
Portfolio:
- mediation and conflict coaching;
- interaction design;
- cross-cultural dialogue facilitation;
- strategic-foresight processes;
- creative concept development; and
- youth empowerment
Simon Adams, Research & Outreach Intern
A recent graduate of the University of Toronto, Simon holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts with a
major in Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and minors in both History and Drama. He has
always been interested in working to create positive cultural and political change. As a resident
of the U.S. city of Chicago, Simon volunteered in the presidential campaign of Senator Elizabeth
Warren, and served the food-insecure at The Uptown Cafe. Simon has also been active with
interfaith programs like “Let’s Get Together,” which involved Chicago’s diverse youth in interfaith
learning about the region’s civil rights and cultural history. In Simon’s free time you can find him
performing standup around the city.
Board of Directors
We are continuing to welcome new members of the Board.
Oriana Vaccarino
Oriana is an Applied Social Psychologist, Global Social Sustainability Strategy and Program Lead, and a Senior Manager in Corporate Citizenship Advisory. She has over 13 years of experience focused on embedding equity, belonging, and human-centered design across strategies, processes, and decisions. Oriana has in-depth experience supporting organizations in complex and people-centered organizational and systems change, with both internal and external stakeholders. Her experience includes a focus on social impact, sustainable supply chain and procurement, modern slavery and human rights, equity and access, intersectionality, inclusive leadership, capability building, stakeholder engagement, and impact measurement. Oriana focuses on building global ecosystem partnerships to enable long-term change and to develop actionable research and toolkits, in fields such as sustainable procurement.
As a social psychologist she has applied various stakeholder engagement approaches, to engage diverse communities in the co-creation and evolution of Trust-Centered methodology and related tools in KPMG Canada and globally across KPMG. Oriana leads stakeholder engagement and ecosystem approaches, including leading recent work with the UN Global Compact. She has worked with clients in multiple languages, including English, French, and Spanish. Prior to joining KPMG, Oriana completed her Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology and her M.Sc. in Mental Health.
Both her research and consulting work focuses on incorporating community voices into decision-making processes (e.g., policies, practices, strategies, programs), people with lived experience whose lives are impacted by these very processes. Oriana emphasizes the economic and social opportunities afforded when inequities and related challenges people face are addressed.